During mid semester break following a group meeting with Amalina, Jac and myself went down to Testing Grounds to interview our artist Hannah Courtin Wilson. As we had trouble getting in contact with our initial assigned artist (who eventually declined to be part of our project), it was refreshing and deeply relieving to arrive on site to a beautiful day, fairly consistent lighting, and a wonderfully open and engaged individual as Hannah.

The interview went smoothly as Jac had set up the two cameras and lapel mic previous to my arrival. The use of two angles was a decision initially suggested by Amalina and since we incorporated that into the filming process, I’ve found subsequent editing sessions have been afforded several degrees of freedom. This is something quite new to me, as I’ve only ever produced media / interview footage in one previous class last semester (Broadcast Media), and one of the primary challenges I noticed was the lack of adequate footage which eventuated in a do-or-die mindset which meant our final cut included a pastiche of average and just acceptable footage, in place of a well produced film.

On Wednesday, Amalina and myself edited in the basement suites in building 9. Jac joined us in the process, and as editing can be described as a one person job (as there is only one mouse and one keyboard essentially), feedback was rampant and group decisions were made through conversation and live critique while Amalina and myself took turns to do the physical editing.

It was enriching to have such a collaborative dynamic between Jac, Amalina and myself as in previous group situations it has often been difficult to balance and mitigate work to different individuals, without feeling some level of politics involved. But as Amalina was skilled in editing due to her previous studies, Jac was in operating tech, and myself having done a bit of both to be fairly comfortable with the software, our filming and editing process was very fairly spread, and I was able to pick up new skills regarding the use of multiple cameras as well as neat tricks on Adobe Premier.

This informs my approach to group situations, as I’ll now be more conscious of involving members (and my own contributions) based on their experiences and strengths; a process which means everyone has a say, and has a say on the topics they are most in tune with. Simultaneously, it means every group member learns from the “expert” in the team, and subsequently enhances their own knowledge of the discipline.

I was ill on Thursday and did not make it to class, but Amalina and Jac continued the editing process which involved fine tuning our original structure, and synchronising the sound to the use of the alternative angle footage. I was told that Robbie had given our group the suggestion to include more textures in the film : examples of the artist’s work,

On Friday, Amalina and myself again ventured down to the suites and (with much appreciation to Hannah and her contributions!) began to layer the structure of the documentary with images of Hannah’s work, and residency at Testing Grounds. We were both very pleased with the final rough cut (we plan to edit further on Monday to fine tune everything), and look forward to receiving feedback and giving it when we share the films in class in Week 8.

On Monday night, our media class trickled down to a luminous and windswept Testing Grounds for a dinner party turned backpack projector exploration of cityscapes.

    

It was particularly enjoyable to have the aesthetics of Testing Grounds to rapidly changed from the previous times I’ve visited. As a consequence of its open air approach to art making and exhibiting, the grounds were wet and ashy, shadows cascading, streetlamps dripping- the dynamic rhythm of metropolitan life starting and stopping, like a pulse, like a flickering lamp.

These observations further marked themselves in the social landscape, as I found myself speaking to classmates otherwise temporally (if not spatially) at a distance from my own body and speech in the classroom. Relegated into a sort of conversational free fall, tongues loosened and projections unfurled onto buildings, bodies, floors, faces.

   

The urgency of that immediate visual feedback from the backpack projectors onto the cityscape at night was perhaps the most memorable part of the night. Having wandered into a desolate carpark (again, harking back to a classmate’s previous exploration of the carpark as a non-place), Rose, Jordan and I ended up shooting a sort of impromtu photoshoot as a result of our response to the carpark and Rose and my incidentally contrasting-yet-complimentary garb.

Ironically occurring in the only planned segment of the evening, this spontaneous blending of the personal body and the public landscape gives rise to some interesting thoughts on the human body in public, as a landscape, as a canvas. For instance, to what extent might we abstract ours and other people’s bodies, objectifying and making canvases of each others’ embodied states, relegating ideologies onto the lives and limbs of others? To what extent do we forget to re-embody ourselves, walking from (s)place-to-(s)place (or perhaps lingering in non-places) as disembodied yet conscious beings?

Perhaps it could be enriching to consider the human body as a testing grounds of consciousness, and the potential for a non-place to manifest in our embodied experience: a non-materialist state (or rather, flux) of being fostered by the external landscape.

Before today’s class, Claudia, Dusty, and I set off to Testing Grounds to meet with Joseph.

Briefly discussing the logistics of the site and our proposed dinner plans, Joseph demonstrated the potential of backpack projectors. Between bits of facts and numbers, Joseph raised a few key points to consider in our practice and approach for Monday night. For instance, Joseph suggested we might curate together a soundtrack in response to the ambience, temporal and spatial qualities of Testing Grounds, rather than a haphazard pastiche of the top 100. I think it would be enriching to meet this head on and to collaborate with the class to create a more personalised, curated soundscape for Monday night.

   
Joseph demonstrating the backpack projectors with Claudia and Dusty.

Additionally, the discussion of the placement of tables and fires brought to the forefront this notion of the landscape as moulding and influencing our ability to behave in certain ways. This idea intrigues me deeply, as it ties into the architectural movement Metabolism. One particular image that has been playing upon my mind is the idea of trains as veins, and commuters as plasma cells, bringing life and movement into a sleepy and awaiting CBD.

Perhaps I can integrate this fixation with the anatomy of society (public) and the anatomy of the personal (body) through the use of projectors on Monday night. One idea would be to project moving images on both bodies and buildings simultaneously, thereby integrating the two often separate landscapes into a homogeneous canvas of light. Just some brief thoughts!    

In today’s tutorial we collectively viewed and critically fed-back our Project 2 films. By exhibiting my own work and opening up the floor for discussion, I was able to enrich my understanding and appreciation of the Auge’s concept of ‘non-place’ through my peers’ engagement.

The critical feedback received included both recognised limitations and new insights on Flux. Some merits that were highlighted included the strong use of the percussive soundtrack, the disorienting effect of the piece’s screen-sizes constantly changing, and the psychological exploration of the space over a literal / physical study.

Some of the limitations to my piece, as highlighted by the class included its lack of an establishing shot and its frenetic pace. Though in some ways both of these were conceptually intended, they remain cogent observations and I definitely agree that I could further enhance my approach by incorporating a higher production value (hi-tech mixed with low-fi) and more tension-conscious editing which prolongs the cadence of the piece.

Additionally, I have been meaning to delve into using more hi-tech equipment but have not yet realised this potential (as a result of both my assignment’s impetus and potentially a subconsciously internalised intimidation). Today’s feedback drove home for me the importance of taking this awareness and lack of experience with higher tech gear and responding to it pragmatically. As a result, for Project 3 I will endeavour to familiarise myself with more sophisticated camera gear.

Other notable factors from today’s tutorial was the enriching experience of seeing other people’s aesthetic and conceptual responses to ‘non-place’. In particular, I enjoyed the animism and camera work of my classmate’s works which gave an edge to the more still / detail-focused shots- an approach clearly lacking in my own work.

I also found it interesting that some works integrated text, narrative, and in some cases- humans into their exploration of supermodernity, as I had not thought to include the presence of society in Flux. Though this was conceptually justified, it nonetheless brought an awareness to my own neuroticisms and fixations with mechanical aesthetics and psychological states over an ‘objective’ or documentation of people and the spaces they dwell in.

FLUX from Elaine Leong on Vimeo.

WORD COUNT: 523

F L U X // The Fire Escape

As posited in Marc Augé’s seminal work Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), supermodern places are uniquely typified by their functional, often instructional properties. Non-places are in this sense allegorical to breaths between spoken words: they are the places-in-between, hovering in the grey area of being and momentarily occurring as they sometimes deliberately, sometimes incidentally facilitate movement and meaning between temporal spaces and human interactions (Augé 1995, pp.94).

SITE

Considering this notion of the spaces-between, my short experimental loop film Flux unravels the utility and aesthetic experience of a fire escape.

Designed for maximum transit efficiency in emergency situations, the fire escape is simultaneously a place inhospitable for prolonged dwelling, yet essential to the structuring of safety conscious social and physical architecture. For instance, it commands specific modes of behaviour through its form, truncating crowds and evacuating buildings of occupants in the same way an artery pulses oxygen rich blood to the vital organs of a body. Fire escapes are the Plan B, the fail-safes of urbanity.

CONCEPTUAL APPROACH

Firstly, to explore the dimensions of the fire escape it is not satisfactory to merely trace its outlines. Lacking a definitive enclosing as it extends upwardly and downwardly simultaneously, dependent on one’s position, the fire escape presents a paradoxical almost infinite formal structure. From this, I decided to explore the unreachable, unrealisable quality of the fire escape’s floorlessness and ceilinglessness by throwing the camera into the air space. Using the on-hand, lowfi, and low-risk-if-it-breaks quality of my phone, I visually and spatially untether my embodied experience of the fire escape, and free the camera to (however momentarily) navigate the groundless ground and the ceilingless ceiling through motion. This further echoes human experiences of the fire escape: as we realise it through our usage so too, the camera breaches and hovers in the potentiality of the fire escape- both physically and movement wise.

A Kubrickesque disintegration of temporal and spatial coherency was also an inspiring factor in the editing. To do this, I employed a select sample (recorded on a H2 Zoom) of doors slammed shut and echoing footsteps and edited them to a percussive, borderline anatomical cadence- a throbbing which infers a dichotomous sense of mechanised repetition and orchestrated claustrophobia.
Additionally as Flux progresses, the camera transforms from a still and controlled mechanism for documentation into a nauseating flurry of disjointed, flickering cuts and blurring forms. This gradual abstraction of the supposedly solid, spatial realm to the unstable psychological experience of panic in the fire escape was key to Flux’s subverting of the heightened legibility required in emergency situations. I wanted to replicate chaos, as it is that which more readily reflects our experience of the fire escape’s raison d’etre than the measured logic of bright symbols.

Divided into five ‘levels’, a direct homage to the building it was filmed in, Flux is intended to play on loop, as this further compliments an audial and visual experience of instability and recalls the fire escape’s structure, which extends across multiple levels- ending at each floor only to begin anew, bridging gaps between levels, neither finishing nor completing itself.

References:

Augé, M 1995, Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, e-book, Verso, pp.75-115, viewed 15 August 2015, http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jread2/Auge%20Non%20places.pdf

In today’s tutorial, Robbie demonstrated some basic sound edits and introduced us to a series of effects and programs we might consider to use for our sound-centric projects.

Despite dealing with some clunky software (audacity seems to me deeply counterintuitive and archaic, and most PC-based sound editors are either expensive or incomprehensible), I managed to curate and edit a sample of a Project 1 sound clip of strong wind drafts blowing my shutters against a lantern on a precariously (somewhat sleazily) labelled “30-day-only-trial” version Adobe Audition

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Highpoints of the class: Taking our laptops and experiencing the soundscape outside of a classroom, into the claustrophobic confines of an elevator and then down a flight of stairs. It was interesting to hear the space suddenly invaded by a flurry of repetitious, somewhat frenetic gushing of echoes and alien esque calls. I will keep this idea of the exhibition-space in mind for the final Signal project.

I’ve worked with Adobe Audition previously for basic radio classes and managed to apply and experiment with some effects including Delay, Echo, Reverb. Further, I layered and looped some sound samples extracted from my initial raw recordings sample. I wanted to avoid anything too overdone or bass-y, preferring instead a more ricocheting and spacious soundscape, as it seemed more in vein with my initial House-Body / Flow concept of capturing the basic grounds, rather than elaborate ornamentation and heavy handed curation.

Something interesting Robbie mentioned was the extent to which we can extrapolate and manipulate a small portion of raw data. With a 1 second raw-data excerpt, I’ve managed to create a textured and more complex 10 second sound bite. It’s an interesting loop of paring back, and creating more with what is essentially less. This observation is significant to consider in relation to our Project 2, as perhaps we can apply this paradoxical curation-meditation to imagery. For example, I will consider how I can abstract my still or moving imagery further through freeze-framing a selection of imagery and repeating it, or delaying (slow-timing) its realisation.

Below is the work from today, which I hastily saved as ‘Spectre sounds’.

   

I had that first interest in Northern Ireland sparked a few years ago in a literature class, studying Seamus Heaney’s poetry.

There’s something about those rolling hills, the softening of consonants in the accent, and the complex political and social landscape of the place which has continually played upon my mind.

Having said this, Mark Cousins’ new film I am Belfast poses some significant points to ponder on the notion of place or non-place. For instance, here, Cousin’s Belfast is anthropomorphized (and personified) as a 1000 year old woman. She walks and navigates the land, speaking of its ills, its Troubles, its quiet charms, its roiling grudges.

How might Melbourne be personified? Or indeed, a non-place in which people do not dwell with distinct, categorical purpose? Those in-between hoverings which seem to incidentally harbour histories- laneways: a spilt coffee, an accidental elbow bumping, a late night brawl- how do these histories feed into the ‘voice’ or the ‘character’ of a non-place?

   

Open skied and somewhat windswept, Thursday’s gallery visit to Testing Grounds was particularly refreshing.

Scattered amongst dense overgrown mallow and grass, bits of artwork and remnants of old exhibitions were found. It was one of the first experiences I’ve had “in” (or rather- out ?) of a gallery in which I was simultaneously the curator and the patron, navigating the space with the (meta)physical  autonomy of someone who might happen upon something, pick it up, and have an artful experience (or not).

Joseph Norster’s challenge to the class to simply have a wander gave rise to some interesting thoughts: what do we look at? where do we wander? where is the art?

The resemblance of the gallery to a construction grounds was not unnoticed either, and holds a degree of poetic justice. The landscape has a rawness, and I suppose this reflects Norster and Cattlin’s practice and philosophy too, as the landscape is moulded and sculpted and passed from resident artist to resident artist.

         
Exteriors and interiors at Testing Grounds, Melbourne 2015 (taken by me)

On the topic of non-place, or spaces between places, Testing Grounds suggests a intriguing meditation. I was drawn in particular to this notion, both politically charged and deliberate, of ‘occupying’ a space, or a place. So often, our interactions and engagements with place are tethered to and hemmed by laws. Loitering laws. No hawkers. No trespassing signs. Even supermarkets and shopping centres, with their distinct lack of seating and utilitarian structures foster a sense of movement and circulation – ostensibly to the demise of a mono no aware sensibility.

I suppose this brings me to a point of questioning: What are the places, or the spaces-between-places which implicate us in their realisation?

For instance, is a house just a structure before its human occupation, which thereby makes it a ‘home’? Further yet, is a library just a place with books, or is it a place in which the reading of those books is the vital, throbbing impetus? And again, revisiting this idea of the mirror dimension- is the (s)p(l)ace reflected and birthed in the mirror inaccessible? Is it a place between spaces? A non-space? A non-place?

Does it occupy?

Can we occupy it?

In this week’s tutorial / studio, the class shared and exhibited each other’s responses to Project 1 – Home.

Spontaneously adjusting to a variety of technological challenges, the resulting exhibition was a sort of curated pastiche of screens and looped sound recordings. I found it particularly interesting to walk around and view my peers’ responses to the same brief, and there was indeed a feeling of voyeurism, dwelling on the private-cum-public spaces.

Acknowledging this though, there’s a degree of tension involved in the practice of exposing the private for the public gaze. For example, and something Robbie mentioned in the studio, was the concept that we have control over the narratives we exhibit. We expose the parts we want to expose, and so this nakedness, this exposure, this exhibition is, albeit its vulnerability, a measured act.

Finally, a point touched upon which resonated with me most was Robbie’s mentioning of Foucault’s mirrors. I’ve previously considered this idea (autonomous to my brief readings and entanglements with Foucault) of the mirror as the fourth dimension, extending and adjusting the ways we define concepts of SPATIAL possibility and AESTHETIC experience.

   
Blue is a wavelength to me… (2013) & The 99 Percent (2015), Instanbul, Erdal Inci

Erdal Inci’s occupation of space (particularly the urban sphere) was deeply hypnotic. I particularly enjoyed the meditative, infinite loop, borderline ethereal qualities to Inci’s short GIFs, which feature him in movement, jumping and crossing stairwells, thereby almost measuring the spatial qualities of his surroundings not in centimetres or inches, but in bodies; his body.

      

F L O W // The House Body

This curation is a meditation on the house as a body. A body of light. A body of bricks. A body of wind. A body which fundamentally truncates and curates the natural environment, thereby reinforcing inner and outer worlds.

Focusing on the interplay of windows and shutters as filtrations of natural light, the imagery in my work explores the aesthetic properties of light in domestic settings. Untethered by rigid concepts of utility, I’ve collected a series of static and moving images which attempt to document the playful, untethered qualities of sunlight-through-glass. A splash of sun leaking through blinds. A rhombus of ochre reflections on a wall. A glint, a dazzle, a haze, framed by buttery walls.

As I began collecting these images, another idea which rose to the foreground was the idea of the house in its physicality, as allegorical to the body. This is not a new thought. Noted by the Japanese architectural movement tellingly known as Metabolism, the logic behind the structures we dwell in is one which often draws deeply from the embodied human experience. Pipes churn and gush like veins, pulsing that vital household utility- water – to the centre points of the house. Sewerage pushes the waste out and doors open and slam; fostering movement and inviting solitude; like crossed arms or a begrudging stare. Similarly, we raise blinds and lower shutters as we do eyelids, animating the house like a secondary body, ensconcing or rejecting light into our spaces.

In this way, the manner in which we use the properties of our houses reflects the language of the house-body. For instance, a room full of open cabinets is much like an unfinished sentence, inviting probing and curiosity, lacking in finality, slightly dangerous (or perhaps confounding) to the unacquainted.

Finally, my sound pieces attempt to address the idea of flow. If the eyes of the house are the windows, it is the gaps between these openings and closings (ledges, doors, air vents) which are the house’s lungs. The ten clips feature a range of recordings, primarily sourced from placing the device near windows, bedsides, doorways. In layering these fly-on-the-wall audial observations of 4am muted heating sounds, strong drafts rushing between window edges, and my partner and my breathing, the flow of the house’s soundscape transcends discrete categorisation:

Is it the wind whispering?

Is it the heater exhaling?

Is it us breathing?